P'unk Avenue Window

About a year ago, P’unk Ave’s Alex Gilbert brought the idea of having a Junto to our weekly meeting. He had been reading Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and thought it was great way to bring people together for a common cause. Referring back to our notes, our intended mission included:

• To help grow the tech/communication/interactive community in Philadelphia
• To further Philadelphia in the national & international web/interactive/communication scene
• Conference – bring them here or have one
• Center for Information
• Co-working
• Technology related to physical spaces
• Bottom up (emergence)

We had our first Junto in March 2007 and one every 3 weeks or so, since then. As we go, we have been evolving and refining the format. We have tried to keep some of the above themes in mind, but have also been very open to experimentation.

Last thursday night, we started with an hour of socializing and then everyone took a number from our TAKACHECK machine. Five discussion groups were created based on chosen numbers. The assignment was to come up with 3 ways to continue on the energy generated from the recent Blog Philadelphia conference. After 30 minutes of brainstorming, we gathered together again and one person from each group had 5 minutes to present the 3 ideas.

The process and results were very satisfying. Each group came up with great ideas and each presenter did a fantastic job. Our group’s main idea was to stage a big game event. Other groups talked about creating an aggregate site and connecting up with students. However the presentation that brought down the house was Dave Speer’s presentation on Identity, Communication and Purpose with main theme of “making a living doing what we love.” In fact, we enjoyed it so much, we actually let him go beyond the 5 minute limit.

Our Junto has only been happening for a short time, but progress has been made on our goals that we guessed at in a P’unk Ave meeting about a year ago. Can’t ask for much more than that.

If you want to join us at a future Junto, add your name to the email list.

We have started doing yoga together at the P’unk Avenue studio before work on fridays.

What an amazing way to start the day. Next week, we are going to do it on our roof deck.

If you want to join us sometime, drop us a line.

There has been a lot of fantastic coverage of the BlogPhiladelphia (un)conference that just went down last thursday and friday. It almost feels unnecessary to add another. But, here goes…

We had a blast attending this conference. We met some new people, deepened relationships with others, and in general had a great time. There was so much positive energy flowing at the conference and there is even more flowing now as this gathering reverberates through the internet waves.

Philadelphia deserves this attention. As a sincere lover of Philadelphia, I could not be any happier.

Many of us have been preparing for this conference, since we had every intention of making this a special event. We wanted to show off our city, our community and our geekiness, if you will. I think we did a pretty good job of that as Rob Sandie of Viddler made pretty clear.

We are not done. We are going to continue to build this interactive community. Collectively we intend to support innovation and entrepreneurial activity in this region by growing things like Independents Hall. Junto, and LikeMind. There are so many other things going on, it is getting hard to keep up.

A lot of great connections have been made, collaborative projects have started, and most importantly, we are having a lot of fun right now.

At the conference, I had a lot of really sincere and meaningful conversations. At an event like this, you are lucky to have a couple good conversations mixed in with general schmoozing and superficial interactions. This was not the case for me at BlogPhiladelphia. The quality of the banter was just so great. I didn’t feel like I was being sold to or fleeced. There was a sense of sharing the pervaded.

For next year, we would love to see more break-out rooms so there can be even more of this type of activity. We would also love to expand the format to so we can legitimately talk about more than blogs. The open grid sessions opened up the conversation a bit, let’s do that even more next year. We are doing some cool new/social media in Philadelphia and it is not all blogs.

It might be nice to have some keynote type of presenations to compliment the discussions, as well.

I want to thank Annie Heckenberger of GPTMC to have the foresight to get this whole thing rolling and for running a fantastic event. Much kudos to Alex Hillman for being a believer in the Philadelphia media community.

P.S. The pre-BlogPhiladelphia Party at our studio was a blast.